So we know what happens when Lawful Good goes too far and you have to fight it

Angelo clearly wasn't good; he attempted to abuse his position as interim ruler of Vienna to take Isabella's virginity in exchange for Claudio's life, a clearly evil act as it would damn the siblings' souls to hell. Him imprisoning Claudio in the first place is also not Good, though it's up to debate if it's Lawful Neutral and simply application of the law or Lawful Evil and an act to set Isabella up. The Duke is more Lawful Good than he is.

Same dude as before, but he also tries to break his own union to Mariana over the dowry, along with backing out on his word when the bed trick was performed and planned to execute Claudio anyways. He's clearly evil and more than likely Neutral Evil if anything.

But is his goal not righteous? Surely the end justifies the means.

I wouldn't call either of them good.

Anyway, when you frame a good antagonist as being someone whose goodness has gone too far, I think you've slipped into evil.

As an example, Arthas was Lawful Good but I think he stopped being good when he culled Stratholme. His zeal for his cause went too far and he became evil in the process.

An antagonist doesn't have to be a villain. A lawful good party could clash with a chaotic good revolutionary because they're in support of the current regime or status quo and he's not.

He doesn't have to be rebelling against an evil status quo. He could simply be an idealistic anarchist, or he could have some other non-evil regime in mind, but the PCs can still be in conflict with him.

If he "goes too far and you have to fight it" then he's no longer good. If Robespierre was good he stopped being good when he decided it was necessary to kill everyone threatening his dream.

Maybe someone who perceives the heroes/"good guy forces" as being evil because of false or faulty intelligence.

So maybe this character wants his good outcome to happen, but notices that some government or society is obstructing it, so he rebels against this society and does his own thing.

Maybe he witnesses some evil person in this society directly oppose his good outcome, and he is led to believe that there is corruption in this society that runs so deep that there is no choice but to destroy it and "free" the people from this tyranny, whereas in reality it's actually just an isolated incident. By the point it's dealt with, maybe he's long gone and set in his quest.

>But what does a strictly Chaotic Good main antagonist to a good aligned party look like?

A chaotic good PC from another campaign. A guy with the best intentions who acts rashly and violently to perceived injustice but leaves most things only halfway done. He's driven by impulse rather than intent and doesn't really think about the effects of his actions beyond the immediate moral catharsis.

He's the guy who humiliates a foreign dignitary from a hostile nation for shaming the honor of the Queen and ends up sparking a war, or the guy who steals food for a starving homeless man only for the man to be arrested and jailed. Unlike the Lawful Good who creates conflict by attempting to micromanage the world, the Chaotic Good antagonist creates conflict by negligence of responsibility.

Chaotic good is an alignment that seeks a more, moral and personal believe, with a complete disregard to laws and anything that may interfere with their goals. If they believe killing ten innocent people would save ten thousand then they do it.

Or if you where a religious individual, your values would be taken to the fundamentalist extreme.

Surely a fundamentalist would be Lawful and those willing to compromise or reform their religion would lean toward Chaotic?

More propaganda from goose-stepping lawfuls. Achtung!

Chaotic characters can be very stubborn if chosen to play that way. Picture a rebel without a cause or someone deeply devoted to the individual.

A dude has some bad run ins with authority, and decides to destroy the local kingdom so no one has to go through the same thing, and he kills the king and all potential heirs.

Then after years of war ravage the land, the neighboring kingdom conquers the land. But the kingdom is pretty much the same as the previous one, so our chaotic good villain decides to do the same thing again.

>Surely the end justifies the means.
Yes. To in what all aligment systems consider either neutral, or evil disposition.

Chaotic good means that you act in a kind and altruistic fashion, but instinctively, randomly and spuriously, without having a plan or end-goal besides just... being good.

A textbook example of a chaotic good character is a traditional Christian vision of a Saint. Like Saint Claus, Wenceslaus, or Saint Thomas in India.
You know, the "Hey, king, I'm an architect and I'm going to build you a sweet palace! Oh, JK, I just used all the money you gave me for construction and gave it to the poor, tee-hee!" style.

Trying to make this into a villain, especially for a good aligned party, is fucking retarded. But then again, aligments are fucking retarded from the very beggining.

Alignments are fucking retarded, but antagonists don't have to be villains. Good characters fight other good characters all the time for whatever reason in stories.

Whether a chaotic good character can be a villain though, I'm not really sure of, but I'd like to see one that's definitely one of those and not just a good character who's a designated antagonist.

>Committing a felony against the rightful ruler is a Good act.

Have it be purely ideological differences not moral.

If you are motivated by altruism and good intentions, yes. Laws don't have to be morally righteous: in this case, the altruistic principle of charity is far more morally upstanding than respect to authorities.
Thomas belived that the king will be rewarded in heaven for going along with it (thus actually benefiting the king), while the poor - obviously, benefit from not dying of hunger. A win-win situation, according to him.

Also, the king was not his king. It was a pagan and the ruler of some Indian kingdom.

>Good characters fight other good characters all the time for whatever reason in stories.
Not really, not in respect to alignment logic. But then again, most stories do not actually follow the twisted and fucked up logic of moral alignments.

Chaotic,
Slowly begins to find reasonable laws more and more oppressive. Initially fights against laws that are unfair between the classes. Eventually aims to tear down civilization and instill anarchy. Stopping bankers and monarchs taking more than their fair share is chaotic good. Tearing down taxation laws at the expense of medical care and education in the name of freedom is chaotic good gone too far.

A example of this sort of behaviour is in the first series of the rebooted Doctor Who; the Doctor jumps around time and space "solving" problems, only to find in the last episode that he'd actually made things worse every time he interfered.

>True Neutral

Alignments are twisted and morals are relative but it's exactly that which allows good characters to fight each other. When two characters are truly altruistic but have opposed mindsets in regards to how to go about something, they might fight. When two heroes with literally identical moral values meet and one of them has a mistaken understanding of a situation and believes the other one is an enemy, they might fight. When two heroes with literally identical moral values, a healthy respect for each other, and a full understanding of each other's circumstances cannot find a compromise due to their relative position in the world meet each other, they might fight.

I mean we get into neutral territory if the argument is "Both people are only doing what's best for their nation", but sometimes the argument is "Both people are only doing what's best not only for nation, but the entire world will be a slightly better place regardless of who wins", then it's good vs good.

You understand fine that people have different values, you should be able to recall or imagine dozens of scenarios where two outstanding individuals might be forced to resort to violence.

Griffith

/thread

>thinking that taxes are actually necessary to provide medical care and education

Found the economic illiterate.

>Alignments are twisted and morals are relative but it's exactly that which allows good characters to fight each other.
Well, in real world you can easily imagine people who you'd both consider equally "good" to end up at massive odds with each other.
However, in a alignment model, moral principles are absolute, non-diversified (otherwise a single character could at the same time be consider both "good" and "evil" merely depending on perspective), which makes presenting a scenario where "good" characters find themselves at odds with each other difficult, if not nonsensical.

Having different values means having different ideas about what is good and what is wrong. And if you can have different ideas about that, your moral system is no longer objective, and that means that your alignment system no longer really works.
Don't forget, according to dn'd Alignmnents, there is always one "right" and "wrong" solution according to the cosmological moral principles.

>Stopping bankers and monarchs taking more than their fair share is chaotic good.

>stealing
>good

You've got the wrong idea of alignments, they're shit, but for the opposite reason that you think. Alignments are bad because they simplify morality and values, forcing you to assign what may be idiosyncratic worldviews to one of nine spaces that're way too encompassing and bleed into each other. They aren't narrow, and there's always far more than a right and wrong to them.

If this weren't the case and it was like you suggested, then we might have one deity to an alignment in each DnD setting, but as it stands, Faerun has multiple Lawful Good deities who don't always see eye to eye. Tyr believes in punishment, Ilmater will tell you to forgive and redeem, Moradin might ask you to just protect what you have.

Two Lawful Good characters, played within alignment, and neither playing Stupid Good or Lawful Stupid could end up fighting because the law asks for an execution when someone is deemed unrepentant and neither will budge on protecting the law and the good when they disagree on whether something is too evil.

Like that one image puts forth, sometimes you need to protect the worst of them, but sometimes even the dead deserve their justice.

go be a Republican somewhere else

I can't really think of anything other than a short sighted anarchist.

For instance, let's say there's a lawful evil kingdom. Pretty shitty place, but they're self aware enough to understand that peasants dying of starvation is bad for business. It borders some super fucked up land full of monsters that would swarm into their kingdom and all of the neighbors if they don't maintain a strong border. This chaotic good character tries to dismantle this kingdom, while ignoring the fact that without a plan to immediately replace the government everyone will be murder-raped by kobolds or whatever else.

Best I got doc, and honestly I don't even think it's very good since it requires the antagonist to be retarded.

Political activist who travels from kingdom to kingdom and sees only the worst in each place. Clearly the current method of rule is only harming the people, so he tries to instigate radical changes. Sometimes they work out for the better in the long run, sometimes not. Basically, his beliefs change to oppose the policies of wherever he is. Currently he's favoring some type of fantasy-communism demanding that adventurers' loot belongs to the people and he's gaining significant traction with the poor.
The kingdom itself is not particularly well off and relies on adventurers to supplement it's rather meagre standing army - one that could not hope to stop the peasant uprising that is brewing.
The guy is actually good, he tries to only do good, cares about what happens after he leaves (though it doesn't always work out the way he hoped), isn't violent or impulsive. He just wants to help the people.

Griffith is definitely not 'good'. He might have a vision about the "greater good", we don't know his endgame, but what he does to get there is objectively selfish and subjectively evil.

I'd place current Guts closer to chaotic good than Griffith.

A Robin Hood-esque revolutionary or bandit who is fighting against the PCs' home country. He uses mostly humane means, strictly avoids causing any civilian casualties, and resorts to trickery to get what he wants.

The only reason he and the PCs are even at odds is a matter of nationalism, with the PCs being loyal to their country and the antagonist being loyal to his, or at least the idea of his country if it doesn't exist.

> As an example, Arthas was Lawful Good but I think he stopped being good when he culled Stratholme
Culling of Stratholme was not only fully justified, it was the only option.

Griffith is just pure lawful evil that in practice results in lawful good actions.

He didn't go too far until he burned the ships of his men. The Culling had to be done, and Uther and Jaina betrayed Arthas and hid behind having the moral high ground, even when they both knew that what happened was necessary and unavoidable. Neither just wanted to do the dirty work.

Might be true, but Arthas shouldn't have done it himself. The culling tainted him and set him on the road to become the Lich King.

It's one of the reasons why I like parties with different alignments. This way when there's a hard choice, the characters with rigid moralities can just leave the difficult things to the more morally flexible members.

You know that copypasta where the party fights for gay marriage instead of stopping the necromancer? Someone like that, but as an NPC. Make the perfect the enemy of the good, and ignore the looming evil.